PRESCRIPTION DE LA SEPARATION ET PSYCHOPATHOLOGIE DU DETACHEMENT A L'ADOLESCENCE

The prescription of separation constitutes a relatively frequent recourse in the hospital cares proposed to the adolescents. It can initiate a hospitalization; it is then a condition of the therapeutic observation. It can punctuate the end of a hospitalization; it then takes into consideration what hampers severely the autonomization of the individual. In any case, it is necessary to insist on two basic points. The 'prescription' of separation is often 'blind': it is not the solution of a difficulty previously known, it rather permits to enlighten an individual psychopathology of the 'attachment' and the 'detachment'. The separation is not a good thing per se, advisedly recalled by some medical 'alter ego', it imposes itself in the end of an often complex itinerary of which the practitioner attempts only to underline the failure or the dead end. For example, it is not exceptional that the so-called 'emergency' hospitalization of an adolescent be the initial and decisive point of a separation. The psychiatrist does not decide such a separation. He ratifies it and is answerable for it so that its meanings can develop later on. As regards the concept of 'detachment', it sends back to what the separation does not permit to cover any longer in the subject's story.